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These women look like they mean business. I certainly would want to argue with them. The look like they could stand their ground under any circumstance. Considering the fact that women weren't given so much consideration at that time, the anti-vivisection movement was well organized and strong. If I wanted help in a lobbying matter, these are the people that I could rely on. Go sister, go!

[The nation's women were a powerful political force. Thanks largely to their efforts, the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments to the Constitution were right around the corner. - Dave]

The internet is full of sites where comments are mocked and people are mean to each other. I guess if you want shorpy.com to become yet another locus of basic incivility, you can do that. But why do you want to? I thought this site was about history and people sharing information. But I guess it's just a vehicle for you to have your entertainment at the expense of others. I'm glad I know that so I can skip the comments sections from now on.

The lady front and center, with the unusual (Swedish) name, was only about 35 at the time of the photo. That year she prosecuted a libel suit in England against a newspaper that had called her a fraud. Despite the fact that the English law was extremely favorable to plaintiffs in defamation cases, she lost. A New York Times article called her courtroom performance record-breaking because, in the 34-hour trial, she spoke over 210,000 words and posed over 20,000 questions to the witnesses.

When I see group photos like this, one thing I usually notice is the spacing between the eyes and how different ethnicities have the eyes spaced really close together (Miss Topknot in the back-right) or miles apart (the 2 Miss Fluffihats on either end of the front row). Oops sorry, that's not a woman seated front-right—that's Buster Keaton.

Birds naturally molt and shed feathers. Even if someone plucked out a feather, it would grow back. Hardly the same as vivisection, is it?

[A lot of the birds used for hats were killed. Most notably the snowy egret, which was almost hunted to extinction due to the use of its plumage in women's hats. This led to some of the first conservation legislation in the United States -- the Migratory Bird Act of 1918. - Dave]

I have no problem eating animals (so delicious), but vivisection -- dissecting live animals without anesthesia -- strikes me as one of the cruelest things we humans can do. My hat is doffed in honour of those sweet old gals who do battle on behalf of animal suffering suffering animals.

75 years before the song "Testure" was released, these beauties are the embodiment of the sentiment behind lyrics like
"face terrified rant and rave smash your head against the cage vacuum
clicks on high conscious of the pain pass off as humane white coat seems
so clean most dirt bleached out of greed force the point of habit eyes burn
in a rabbit push the pain test button spines cut trip mucous inflection"

Actually, I see only one hat has what do appear to be feathers, whereas two of the ladies have adopted slightly unconventional-looking fabric and lace plumes, and none of them are wearing the furs that were quite fashionable at the time, though we don't know the time of year and weather. I'm inclined to wonder whether and how the feather-wearing lady had to defend her choice to her fellows.

Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photo blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.